Now you've got me trying to remember a bad 1960s-ish SF novel I read where the oceans started emitting gas. Ships sent to investigate were destroyed, possibly fell to their doom where the plume of gas left no water. Lower elevations of earth became uninhabitable because the air wasn't breatheable. I think Denver survived. ID, anyone?

For a better old fashioned SF novel of oceanic destruction over which no plane could fly, see John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes.

I'm kind of surprised, you'd think the energy from a surface impact, even of a jetliner nose-diving, would attenuate into nothing by the time it reaches the sea floor. The depth in that part of the ocean is no more than 100 meters, but that wave is still going to have to penetrate layers of varying density (temperature) and the sediment on the sea floor, which would essentially act as a backing material to prevent that pressure wave from reaching the seismic plate below. According to this, the sediment thickness (or depth to "acoustic basement) in that part of the ocean is much, much thicker than the actual ocean depth.

And U.S. scientists are already skeptical about these Chinese claims. That's (possibly) twice now in just a few days that China has been publicly wrong about their "findings." It's kind of unlike them to do that, and you'd think after that "debris" turned out to be two boats moored together they'd be more careful. The part of me that has read bad Tom Clancy thrillers wants to say that maybe the Chinese were messing around with hacking commercial airliners remotely. Maybe they're trying to throw people off the scent....

Fark It:I'm kind of surprised, you'd think the energy from a surface impact, even of a jetliner nose-diving, would attenuate into nothing by the time it reaches the sea floor. The depth in that part of the ocean is no more than 100 meters, but that wave is still going to have to penetrate layers of varying density (temperature) and the sediment on the sea floor, which would essentially act as a backing material to prevent that pressure wave from reaching the seismic plate below. According to this, the sediment thickness (or depth to "acoustic basement) in that part of the ocean is much, much thicker than the actual ocean depth.

And U.S. scientists are already skeptical about these Chinese claims. That's (possibly) twice now in just a few days that China has been publicly wrong about their "findings." It's kind of unlike them to do that, and you'd think after that "debris" turned out to be two boats moored together they'd be more careful. The part of me that has read bad Tom Clancy thrillers wants to say that maybe the Chinese were messing around with hacking commercial airliners remotely. Maybe they're trying to throw people off the scent....

At this point is that idea even that crazy?

I'm with you on the Chinese claims. However, I remember somewhere that Air France 447 was detected by Submarines or SOSUS (or whatever they're calling it these days)

b2theory:I'm with you on the Chinese claims. However, I remember somewhere that Air France 447 was detected by Submarines or SOSUS (or whatever they're calling it these days)

Right, but submarines and sonobuoys are both in the water, they're not seismic monitors. The acoustic wave from an impact is going through water in that case. In order to be picked up by a seismic monitor, (one on the other side of an island), it has to travel to the sea floor, through sediment, and into a seismic plate, and transfer enough energy into that plate to be picked up however many miles away and stand out among the underlying backscatter. I'm not a physicist by any means, but in the field for which I am currently going to school, I have to have an above-average knowledge of physics, particularly acoustics.

Water is an excellent conductor of acoustic energy. Sediment and rock, not so much.

Fark It:b2theory: I'm with you on the Chinese claims. However, I remember somewhere that Air France 447 was detected by Submarines or SOSUS (or whatever they're calling it these days)

Right, but submarines and sonobuoys are both in the water, they're not seismic monitors. The acoustic wave from an impact is going through water in that case. In order to be picked up by a seismic monitor, (one on the other side of an island), it has to travel to the sea floor, through sediment, and into a seismic plate, and transfer enough energy into that plate to be picked up however many miles away and stand out among the underlying backscatter. I'm not a physicist by any means, but in the field for which I am currently going to school, I have to have an above-average knowledge of physics, particularly acoustics.

Water is an excellent conductor of acoustic energy. Sediment and rock, not so much.